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Untold stories of a game developer

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In our latest game dev adventure, we were looking for a way to use our sticker app as a level editor for our upcoming puzzle app that uses the same set of assets.

A little backstory…

Our latest app allows users to pull an image from a tray at the top of the screen and resize it, rotate it, flip it and place it onto a background to build a scene. It’s basically a sticker book, or for those of you over 30, it’s like Colorforms.

Our next app is a jigsaw puzzle that, upon completion, is filled with interactive characters. It also just happens to use the same backgrounds and stickers from the aforementioned project.

…so, as I was saying, we needed an editor that would allow us to place the characters in the puzzle (to avoid painstakingly positioning them a pixel at a time.)

THE HACK

Since the sticker app saves each scene you build in a file called stickerData.txt, and the touchscreen controls work much better on an actual device than our mouse-and-keyboard app simulator, we hacked the app so that we could tap a button on the options menu to email out the stickerData.txt file from the device.

Now I can position the characters anyway I want on the iPad and email that data to my partner without even touching my computer. Here’s to creative solutions *clink!

I love the mechanics of lander games and the fun, to me, is maneuvering your rocket through a series of subtle movements into a good position and a soft landing. It’s difficult but rewarding.

Traditionally these types of games had a variety of buttons: rotate, left, rotate right, thrust, etc.

However, on the target devices I have one button, the touch screen; and I refuse to clutter the screen with complex controls just so it plays exactly like the originals (see my last post about UI.)

In order to simplify, I ask my favorite question: “What makes it fun?” and my cat looks at me like “Who are you talking to?!”

What I came up with…

Gravity – yes, still fun after all these years!

Rotating – a little frustrating to manage and even time consuming

Thrusting – absolutely, compensating for a force like gravity or your last thrust, in order to change direction, is fun.

Managing fuel – no way, maybe its just me, but I don’t like time limits. I don’t want to tell a player “You know this fun little playground I made?, well you can only play here for THIS long.”

Avoiding an obstacle or flying to collect an object – yes! an opportunity to test your flying skill.

Landing – yes, slow down and center yourself over the target for a soft, safe landing.

The Redesign

I immediately wanted to remove the fuel consumption issue. This is in essence, a time limit. It makes sense for quarter munching coin-ops, but doesn’t in a free mobile game. The gameplay is not made more fun by adding a time limit and removing it allows you to focus on manuvering even if you need to take your time.

Most classic gravity and lander games allow you to rotate your ship so that you can thrust in any direction. Again, this is something that I felt I could remove. With a simple up, left or right control scheme, I can move in any direction by timing my taps (except down, and gravity takes care of that.)

A Prototype

The prototype allowed me full control over my ship and maintained the fun of using your skill and instinct to manage the physics of flying through space. It was fun but simple; easier for general audiences to pick up and play but very challenging at the same time.

…and so I moved ahead with development! The next post will be about game physics.

Thanks for reading and be sure to like and follow Tappy Lander on Facebook and Twitter for daily updates.

I went with Tappy Lander! because it sounds fun to me and it’s descriptive of the game’s content without being boring. In the game you will tap the controls to land your rocket on the target (trying not to explode in the process.) The name is actually informative in that tapping is a better strategy than holding the buttons because of the precision of the physics-but I’ll talk about that in another post.

Other factors that went into naming the game:

We are targeting phones as the primary game platform. I’m very particular about little details and it bugs me when the words under the icon on my phone have a “…” appended to the text. Best case scenario, the title in its entirety is completely visible and “Tappy Lander” as well as “Tappy Lander!” fits.

This game falls under the “lander” genre of games, the first of which is Lunar Lander (1979 Atari coin-op)

If I’m being completely honest, “Tappy” was inspired by “Flappy”. It was Flappy Bird that inspired us to try quick, simple projects and I’m having so much fun developing this game. No apologies!

The next post will probably be about influences.

Thanks for reading and be sure to like and follow Tappy Lander on Facebook and Twitter for daily updates.

Mike and I have been making kids apps as Eggroll Games since November of 2011. But this year, inspired by the success of a certain Flappy game, we both decided to make a quick, simple project.

I told Mike the day we made this decision that I had always wanted to make a lander game, so…

Concept Sketch

This is the first sketch I drew of the lander game. It shows the control panel (which hasn’t changed much) and a rocket landing on an elevated platform with jagged, outer-space mountains in the background.

Thanks for reading and be sure to like and follow Tappy Lander on Facebook and Twitter for daily updates.

I was hoping Apple would announce an official controller at their iPhone event today. It’s conceivable since they revealed iOS 7’s little-touted controller API when announcing the new operating system a few months ago (current controllers use the keyboard API.)

The Apple brand could standardize mobile controllers and open the door for playing apps on Apple TV–and who doesn’t want a brand new console?

I love touchscreens and the gaming innovations that have followed, but if Apple unveiled this console, which aside from building the controller hardware would only require a software update for Apple TV, they could disrupt the games industry all over again.